Enter your email to subscribe:

It comes as no news (at least it shouldn't) to any classroom teacher worth their salt that each student has a different learning style. Some are visual learners, some are kinesthetic learners, some aural, etc. So, you're now thinking to yourself: "OK chief, tell me something I don't already know!"

Your wish is my command. The thing is, until this new study was released, it was all just a hypothesis. University of Pennsylvania researchers have just proven, using magnetic resonance imaging technology, that people who identify themselves as visual learners do indeed convert verbal information into pictures and vice-versa for verbal learners when the teacher uses pictures.

The more strongly an individual identified with the visual cognitive style, the more that individual activated the visual cortex when reading words.

The opposite also appears to be true from the study’s results.

Those participants who considered themselves verbal learners were found under fMRI to have brain activity in a region associated with phonological cognition when faced with a picture, suggesting they have a tendency to convert pictorial information into linguistic representations.